The Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) recently announced a record-breaking year for the California Research and Education Network (CalREN), the advanced network that serves California’s K-20 research and education communities, providing high-performance connectivity to over 10 million Californians every day. Traffic flowing through CalREN to external networks topped out at 18 Petabytes in February 2013, with a 99.1% growth rate over February 2012. The growth rate from January 2012 to January 2013 was similarly impressive at 93%.
The California Research and Education Network (CalREN)As well as connecting the vast majority of California’s K-20 research and education communities with one another, CalREN also links them with colleagues globally at extremely high speeds through its connections with other similar networks throughout the world.
“These impressive trends in traffic growth are only the beginning of a new era for CalREN and the CENIC communities,” said CENIC President and CEO Louis Fox. “In the months to come, CENIC will begin implementing 100G connectivity to CalREN for early adopter institutions in California. Of course, the West Coast backbone for the Pacific Wave international peering exchange by which CalREN connects to similar networks in the Pacific Rim is already operating at 100G, so we look forward to accelerating this growth in network traffic even more in the future.”
Pacific Wave is an international peering exchange operated by CENIC together with the Pacific Northwest Gigapop and it is operated in collaboration with the University of Southern California and the University of Washington. More than 40 countries’ advanced networks peer with one another at any of five locations in three cities along the US West Coast, all connected by a 100G backbone.
“100G networking is transformational,” said Greg Bell, Director of the Energy Sciences Network (ESnet). “Faster data means faster discovery in fields as diverse as genomics, particle physics, climate, and materials sciences. This exciting year of record growth for CENIC is very likely just the tip of the iceberg.”
Last month, CENIC also previewed ultra-high-speed network-enabled research at an invited workshop co-sponsored with the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) and the US Department of Energy’s Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), and held at Calit2’s Atkinson Hall on the campus of UC San Diego. Speakers and attendees at “100G and Beyond: Ultra High Performance Networking in California” examined the ways in which 100G networking will revolutionize scientific, medical, media arts, smart manufacturing, scientific workflows and network research itself as well as examining the campus cyberinfrastructure necessary to enable campuses to take full advantage of the coming bandwidth.
“CENIC’s leadership in rapidly upgrading to 100G is critical to maintaining the competitiveness of California’s research institutions,” said Larry Smarr, founding director of Calit2. “The National Science Foundation just awarded UCSD a grant to build 10-80Gpbs dedicated optical fibers across the campus connecting our data-intensive researchers. Obviously, UCSD will require a 100G connection to CENIC, and through it to the national and international research networks, to make effective use of UCSD’s new Big Data Freeway system.”
About CENIC • www.cenic.org
California’s education and research communities leverage their networking resources under CENIC, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California, in order to obtain cost-effective, high-bandwidth networking to support their missions and answer the needs of their faculty, staff, and students. CENIC designs, implements, and operates CalREN, the California Research and Education Network, a high-bandwidth, high-capacity Internet network specially designed to meet the unique requirements of these communities, and to which the vast majority of the state’s K-20 educational institutions are connected. In order to facilitate collaboration in education and research, CENIC also provides connectivity to non-California institutions and industry research organizations with which CENIC’s Associate researchers and educators are engaged.
Pacific Wave is a joint project between the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) and the Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP), and is operated in collaboration with the University of Southern California and the University of Washington. The distributed design of Pacific Wave allows participants to engage in bilateral peerings regardless of which node they are physically connected to. This design offers significant flexibility and opportunities for networks utilizing any of a dozen trans-Pacific cables for their circuits as well as for building redundancy and robustness into peering relationships that would otherwise be cost prohibitive and complex to engineer.
The California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) is an academic research institution jointly run by the University of California, San Diego and the University of California, Irvine. Calit2 was established in 2000 as one of the four UC Gray Davis Institutes for Science and Innovation. As a multidisciplinary research institution, it is devoted to conducting cutting-edge research discovering new ways in which emerging technologies can improve the state's economy and citizens' quality of life. Keeping in mind its goal of addressing large-scale societal issues, Calit2 extends beyond education and research by also focusing on the development and deployment of prototype infrastructure for testing new solutions in real world environments. Calit2 also provides an academic research environment in which students can work alongside industry professionals to take part in conducting research and prototyping and testing new technologies.
Janis Cortese is Manager of Communications and Publicity for CENIC.
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